Both Flesh and Not, David Foster Wallace

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Reseña en inglés de la colección póstuma de ensayos Both Flesh and Not, de David Foster Wallace.

Both Flesh and Not
David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown, 2012

This is not DFW´s best non-fiction collection, but neither is it superfluous nor is it inferior.

There is quite a lot of literary criticism and non-fiction geared towards readers who arguably would be writers and therefore interested in these subjects. These pieces are:

Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young: on the effect of TV on young writers in the 80's. Young writers get divided into camps that now seem rather obvious and even dated as some no longer really exist: Workshop manufactured, chemically neutered, corpse-grinders ("stories as tough to find fault with as they are to remember after putting them down"); catatonic Carver clones, offshoots of the dirty realism fad created by Carver/Lish/Granta; and yuppie nihilists in the vein of Bret Easton Ellis, which, btw, explains BEE's adolescent twitter attacks against DFW coinciding with the publication of this book. These attacks, amusing and pathetic though they were, reminded me of Franzen´s postmortem evisceration of his best friend in The New Yorker. Waiting for someone to die before you can work up the courage to attack them publicly is always a great demonstration of character.

The Empty Plenum: which explains DFW's claim that Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress was a masterpiece and illuminates Wallace's own admiration for late Wittgenstein and his philosophy of language.

Mr. Cogito: basically a blurb for a Zbigniew Herbert's book.

The Nature of fun: on how publishing and any amount of recognition are bad for writers, who should avoid thinking about the reception of their books like the plague. Jeffers famously said about this: "The only fame that is not harmful to a writer is posterity". Classic Wallace double bind stuff.

Five direly underappreciated US novels: self explanatory.

Rhetoric and Math Melodrama: explains why math and literature should not mix. He would've done well to follow his own advice on this.

The Best of the Prose Poem: on why prose poems do not really exist.

Borges on the Couch: against psychoanalytic biographical interpretaions of literature. This bookends nicely with Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky, from CTL.

Deciderization: DFW was made editor of the Best American Essays volume for 2007. Imagine therefore the amount of essayistic hand-wringing involved in Wallace confronting the concept of deciding why one essay is "better" than another.

That pretty much is the extent of the writer´s writer pieces in the book. The other ones are on tennis (Both Flesh and Not: on Federer and the aesthetics of sports; Democracy and Commerce in the US Open: on just that, same approach as ASFTINDA, but with the US Open and way less passion, thoroughly yawn-inducing), on AIDS as an opportunity to reevaluate what sex is and means (Welcome to New Fire), freedom and terrorism (Just asking), on how Hollywood movies can be art and how good directors get corrupted (Terminator) and words, grammar and usage (24 Word Notes).

This last one tickles me because there is a short video of Wallace explaining his dislike of "puff-words", which is the point of his first word criticism on that 24 word list. Very concisely, Wallace's problem with "utilize" is that it is a puff-word for which a simpler more common word exists: "use". This is funny because I can think of very few writers more attuned to how using a more complex synonym for what you are trying to say colors your prose. Wallace, of course, was always wrestling with this polarity (be erudite to the point of snobbery, but also as casual and street-wise as possible). Further, in the video you can see in Wallace's face his disgust for snobs who will steal one extra third of a second from him by using puff-words in one of those very unusual unguarded moments where he is projecting a really negative emotion publicly. I shudder to imagine him having this same reaction after reading some draft of himself he wasn't satisfied with. Hard.

Here´s the video:

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Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner

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Nota en inglés sobre Leaving the Atocha Station de Ben Lerner, sobre el papel del arte en relación con la historia y la actualidad.
 
Leaving the Atocha Station
Ben Lerner  
Coffeehouse Press
 
This book has two good things going for it: the narrator is smart (which is not very usual, as smarts cannot be easily faked), and his voice pulls off the "Humbert Humbert effect" of making you like him despite his being both a poser and a hypocrite.

Adam, the narrator and a stand-in for Lerner, a poet himself, has interesting things to say about poetry as the art of potentiality, as a way to embody the virtual, the "subjunctive": what could be but is not and will not. This paradox ("embodying the virtual") leads him to conclude that poetry is a intrinsically failed endeavor, and is the reason why he feels like a total fake for posing as a poet, which feeling is either caused by or causes him to indulge in heavy drug use and the slacking off expected of procrastinating artists abroad, with no financial obligations and too much time on their hands.

Adam's antics have the flavor of a Woody Allen movie, his hand-wringing about authenticity always accompanied by compulsive duplicity and self-sabotage. This makes for a good part of the novel's most hilarious moments, which makes it a breezy read, despite some of the heavier philosophizing on aesthetics.

It seems to me this is an earnest investigation into the possibilities of art to comment on reality and have a "profound effect" on people, in the guise of a self-reflective, postmodern, dark-humored romp, a technique that brings to mind the dilemma common in DFW: "It would probably be better to call our own art’s culture now one of congenital skepticism. Our intelligentsia distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material possession is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level". How, therefore, to speak seriously about serious topics in literature, without eliciting a condescending smirk. Thus, the self-mocking of his constant worrying about poetry's purpose, his identification as a poet, and his self-disgust at his own duplicitous situation and personality seem to be a cover for the "uncool" task of asking himself seriously what is the importance of art when compared to the urgency of the actual and historical.

Are these pretzel-like contortions truly necessary? Is this dilemma the true condition of contemporary literature? Or is it just that young writers self-consciously choose to don overwrought armors to battle, which would, should they fall flat on their backs, prevent them from getting up?

It's an enjoyable read, wholly recommended. If nothing else, you'll get a good laugh or two out of it... unless you are a poet, in which case you might get angry instead.

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Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

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Reseña en inglés de la primera biografía, claramente prematura y algo escueta, del escritor más importante de la generación nacida en los 60 en EEUU: David Foster Wallace.

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
D.T. Max
Viking Adult, 2012
356p

This biography, useful as it is in providing some needed context, feels flimsy.

The most obvious missing piece in this bio is an exploration of David Wallace's relationship to his mother. It is quite clear even from Max's work that this relationship was central both to who David Wallace was and to the stylistic and thematic choices in his work. The difficulty of such an endeavor is clear. In unveiling whatever that relationship might have been like, Max risked offending Wallace's family, a risk that can derail a biography. The qualms of writers of biographical material, both tactical and borne out of common courtesy and compassion, are well exemplified in the first piece that actually touched on the matter of Wallace's relationship with his mother. In Maria Bustillo's Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library, comment after comment on the self-help books he owned point to the crippling influence of his mother on Wallace's life. After this article was published, revealing something that reader's might have been gleaning from pieces like Suicide as a sort of present, Present Tense... and character's such as Avril Incandenza, a total of 21 out 320 books from the library of DFW on display at the Harry Ramson Center in Austin were removed from public access by Wallace's Estate. There is no question that family members should be spared the grief of seeing their intrafamilial relationships dissected in public in a biography. Also, arguably, no biography of David Foster Wallace can be complete without an extensive exploration of this relationship. This conundrum probably means that we will have to wait for a definitive biography of Wallace for a few years.

Further, there is extensive research done up until after the publishing of Infinite Jest in 1996, at which point Max makes a mad dash for the finish line as if the main objective of the bio had already been accomplished. It takes Max until page 220 to get to the publication of IJ and he then proceeds to wrap up the next 6 books, Wallace's final crisis and all material and analysis of Pale King in 80 pages. This approach left me with the feeling that Max unspoken conclusion for the biography was that Wallace is a failed writer, that published an astounding but essentially unfollowable book in IJ. This would be a massive underestimation of Wallace's work. It is also, however, possible that Max simply ran out of time. This was widely expected book and there must have been a lot of pressure to put it out fast. One would assume that if heavy research was put in at the early stages, it would have had to be sparse at the end with the deadline approaching.

Max's style provides evidence to support the rush theory. There are, for example, sentences that must originate in transfer from subject to biographer and that patient editing might have weeded out, such as in the inadvertently funny: "He knew that he had to write for himself and not think about the reader, but that was easier to enunciate than to enact." One is reminded of Wallace's video about "puffed up words", as well as his penchant for renovating clichés with smart word play; in this case, however, "easier to enunciate than to enact" is not an improvement on the equally lame cliché "easier said than done". The book is not badly written, but there are a few of these little surprises lying around in it.

The biography also fails to transmit what Wallace aptly called his "psychic pain". In Max's bio Wallace will be feeling depressed in one sentence and then hospitalized in the next and out of the hospital by the next paragraph. There is a feeling that Max felt that dwelling on unsavory topics such as what it actually feels to be severely, clinically depressed was somehow offensive to his subject, or that his journalistic principles kept him from approaching the more subjective aspects of "how it felt" for Wallace. This, of course, can all be found on Wallace's work, but one would think it necessary in a book that is supposed to provide context for his own life decisions.

Is this DFW first bio worthy of your attention, then? Yes, despite its shortcomings. It provides much needed information and context. There are no incredible insights from Max himself, it feels rushed and skips important topics, but it is in all a worthwhile read.


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